Black ink tattoo on a forearm of a stack of books with open pages lifting into a flock of birds, in a sketchy linework and shaded style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Books turning into birds on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stack of three books sits at the bottom of the design, with an open book above it whose pages lift into a loose column of flying birds that rise towards the top of the forearm. The outlines are bold and the pages and book covers are filled with hatched and scribbled shading. The design is entirely black ink on pale skin, shown straight on against a dark, cluttered studio background.

Forearm Book Stack of books Open book Bird Flight

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bindery at the edge of Thornsby smells of hide glue and rain, and you are the only one who still comes up the lane before the church bell. Mrs Ashdown leaves the shutters closed until you have fed the stove and laid out the thread. Her husband took the last cart of books to the coast in March and never came back for them, so the shelves hold what the village has given up: almanacs with their covers gone, a hymnal swollen from the flood, three volumes of a dead doctor's letters that nobody will read.

Keep reading

The trouble began with the wood. Every autumn the rooks came out of Gallow Copse in a black sheet and settled on the ridge, and every autumn someone complained that they had eaten the hay. This year Mrs Ashdown said they were reading. She pointed at the almanac on your bench, where the pages had been pressed so long that the ink had gone to dust, and said that a book left too long in damp will want to leave.

You laughed, then didn't. That night you carried the almanac to the edge of the trees and opened it on a stump. Its leaves lifted one by one, the way a hand lifts to shade the eyes, and they went up into the dusk stiff and grey-edged, flapping badly, learning as they went. Above the copse they wheeled and took the shape of the rooks. Three of the doctor's letters went after them, slower, and the hymnal last of all, its song somewhere in its wings.

In the morning the shelves were bare except for a stack of books under the bench, squared and heavy and unwilling to be moved. Mrs Ashdown did not ask where the rest had gone. She set a fresh pot of glue on the stove and said, gently, that the birds would need somewhere to come back to, so you began again with the thread.